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Pixel Scroll 6/13/18 But File’s Just A Pixel And Pixels Weren’t Meant To Last

(1) WW 1984. Director Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot tweeted today about Wonder Woman 2 — now called Wonder Woman 1984. Jenkins’ tweet shows that Chris Pine is in the movie even though his character, Steve Trevor, was killed at the end of Wonder Woman.

In nearly two decades of publishing short fiction, you’ve built so many different universes and mythologies where we are only offered a glimpse of what seems like a much richer context. Most of these stories are one-offs; what was it about the Hexarchate concept that compelled you grow it into a larger epic? Have you entertained the idea of expanding on any of your other stories?

I’d been wanting to write a novel for a while, but my first substantive attempt, which I (affectionately?) call the Millstone Fantasy Novel, was ten years in the making and turned out to be fatally flawed, so I trunked it. I love space opera, though, everything from Simon R. Green’s Deathstalker books to Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga to Jack Campbell’s Black Jack Geary books, and I wanted to try my hand at it. Even then, Ninefox Gambit was originally going to be a one-off. When I came to the end, however, I realized that I had more to say about the setting and more ideas for plot. I suppose part of it’s laziness as well–having generated all those setting details, it seemed a shame not to get some more use out of them!

I’ve occasionally thought about revisiting a few of my past stories, but most of them feel complete in themselves. Especially at shorter lengths, I’m really more focused on the idea than building an elaborate world that can be explored again and again. I’m probably more likely to do something new and different to keep myself entertained.

(3) IT’S IMPOSSIBLE. In “Timothy and Babies”, Camestros Felapton and Timothy the Talking Cat get into a big brawl over terminology despite never once using the word “decimate.”

Dramatic Personae:

Camestros Felapton – raconteur and bon-vivant

Timothy the Talking Cat – a rat-auteur and bomb-savant

Mrs Brigsly – an inhabitant of Bortsworth and carekeeper of a baby

A baby – a baby of unknown provenance in the care of Mr Brisgly

[Timothy] I had to look up ‘bon-vivant’ and the dictionary did not say ‘binges on Netflix and chocolate hob-nobs’
[Camestros] It is more of an attitude than a strictly prescribed lifestyle.
[Timothy] and I’m the one who tells anecdotes in a ‘skilful or amusing way’
[Camestros]…well…
[Timothy] It cleary says “OR”!
[Camestros] Let’s change the subject shall we? I’m already on the sixth line of dialogue, I’m not going back and changing the list of characters now.

Many poems attempt to communicate an impression or an emotion. A poem about nature might not be intended to communicate “here is an intellectual idea about nature,” but instead “this is what it looked like through my eyes” and “this is how it felt.” Fine art landscapes can be like that, too. They depict a place at a time, both transient, through the eye of the painter (where the eye of the painter may figure more or less into the image, depending on whether it’s a realistic painting, etc).

What this makes me wonder is–why are we so dismissive of this in fiction? Plots are excellent; ideas are excellent. But what’s so wrong with a slice of life, that we refer to it with distaste? Why can’t fiction be about rendering transient, momentary emotions? Why do we demand they always be in the context of a plot?

…In the interest of slaying this monster, I’m going to walk you through the opening pages of Ann Leckie’s Hugo Award-winning Ancillary Justice—which gives the reader the perfect amount of info, without becoming too dumpy.

Think of this like going on a date, or grabbing coffee with a new friend—you give a few details, sure, but you don’t narrate a bullet list of your whole life. When you’re writing, you’re on a date with your reader. Ideally, your story will charm them enough that they lose track of time and hang out with you until you both suddenly realize that the restaurant has closed, all the other diners have left, and an annoyed busboy has to unlock the front door to let you out.

To get a feel for how to include lots of worldbuilding without killing your story’s momentum, let’s look at an example of a great opening. The first four pages of Ancillary Justice introduce us to a mysterious narrator, a harsh world, and two different conflicts right away, all while seeding in enough questions about the book’s world to keep us turning pages. You can read the first chapter over on NPR; below, I’ll pull the text apart (roughly half of NPR’s excerpt) paragraph by paragraph and unpack how and why it works.

The move comes two days after Keya Morgan was arrested on suspicion of filing a false report to police.

Stan Lee on Wednesday filed for a restraining order against the man he said last week was the only person who was handling his affairs and business, Keya Morgan, a Los Angeles Superior Court media relations rep confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.

Lee was granted a temporary restraining order against Morgan, authorities told THR. The request for a permanent order is 43 pages long. A court date to decide that request is set for July 6.

The restraining order request was filed two days after Morgan was arrested on suspicion of filing a false report to police. Morgan was released from jail on $20,000 bail.

The LAPD is investigating reports of elder abuse against Lee. The investigation began in February, but only became public knowledge Wednesday.

Brad Bird’s virtuosic 2004 animated movie The Incredibles is the best superhero film that has ever been made and is likely the best superhero film that ever will be made.

This is a fact — a cold, hard one. The massive, resolute, essential truth of this fact is abiding and irresistible and immovable; it possesses its own magnetic field, its own solar day….

The villain — a mysterious masked figure known as the Screenslaver, who uses television to control the minds of hapless citizens (and heroes) — arrives with a villainous manifesto, albeit a slightly muddier one than that of the first film’s nemesis. And that same conceptual muddiness, a byproduct of the sequel’s need to expand on and complicate the world of the first film, seeps slowly into the entire film.

June 13, 1953 — The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms was released theatrically.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Born June 13 – Malcolm McDowell, 75. Alex in A Clockwork Orange of course but King Arthur in Arthur the King, Dr. Miles Langford in Class of 1999, Soran in Star Trek: Generations, Arcady Duvall in the Jonah Hex episode of Batman: The Animated Series, Mr. Roarke, The Host, in the second Fantasy Island series, and far, far took many other roles to note here.

(12) PURE IMAGINATION. The Washington Post’s John Kelly asks “Are cartoon characters on lottery scratch-off tickets a way to lure young gamblers?”. The journalist investigates the Willy Wonka Golden Tickets currently being sold by the Maryland Lottery, and is told by Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency director Gordon Medenica that they aren’t trying to get kids hooked on lottery tickets because Willy Wonka “has almost zero resonance with children today.”

To put it another way: Are colorful, cartoonish Racing Presidents and Willy Wonka scratchers the alcopops and fruit-flavored vape pens of the lottery world?

I contacted the two lottery agencies and they said no. Oh, good, okay then. .?.?.

But, you know, let’s explore this a little more.

Gordon Medenica, director of the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency, said he was actually a little reticent when first approached by the company that created the Willy Wonka scratch-off, Scientific Games of Las Vegas.

“Frankly, we avoided it for some period of time,” he said. “My concern was still mainly just a personal thing: Isn’t this a children’s brand? Shouldn’t we be avoiding something like this?”

What changed Medenica’s mind were assurances from Scientific Games that Willy Wonka was no longer a children’s character. Many casinos, they reminded him, have Willy Wonka-branded slot machines.

“The adults who play the games have a fond memory of that movie, but in fact it has almost zero resonance with children today, oddly enough,” Medenica said.

This 57,000 sq.ft. castle is in Menio GA — that’s near the state line with Alabama but not terribly near any sizable city. By road, it’s about 100 miles NW of Atlanta, about 50 miles SSW of Chattanooga TN, and a little over 100 miles NE of Birmingham AL. From my home (Huntsville AL), I’d have to travel over 80 miles EbS — part of it through some seriously back-country roads across the Cumberland Plateau.

The owner has dropped the asking price from $1,500,000 to a mere $999,999 (it’s been on Zillow for over 1000 days, after all). Earlier in the decade it was listed for as much as $5,9000,000. It has 30 bedrooms; 15 bathrooms; and sits on almost 250 acres.

Only 18,000 sq.ft. of the 57,000 sq.ft. floor space is finished, but Zillow says materials are on site to finish out most of the rest. Only some of the exterior stonework is installed. Think of it as your own little fixer upper. (You should be handy with a backhoe if you want to extend the ceremonial water feature in front to a full moat.)

A Tennessee woman is proactively suing NASA to keep what she says is a vial of moon dust gifted from astronaut Neil Armstrong.

Laura Cicco said Armstrong was a family friend, and that her mother gave her a tube of priceless lunar particles when she was 10, along with a note that read: “To Laura Ann Murray — Best of Luck — Neil Armstrong Apollo 11

Cicco told The Washington Post she kept Armstrong’s autograph in her bedroom but didn’t see the dust until she was going through her parents’ possessions five years ago.

NASA has not confiscated the vial, but Cicco says she doesn’t want the space agency to take it, so she filed a lawsuit on Wednesday to proactively assert her rights.

It might seem strange to sue at this point, but proactive law maintains that in some cases, such as those involving trademarks, contracts, and potential disputes, it is easier, cheaper and faster to address problems before they happen instead of reacting to them.

Watch the official trailer for Strange Angel, premiering June 14th, exclusively on CBS All Access. Strange Angel, a drama series created by Mark Heyman (Black Swan, The Skeleton Twins) and based on George Pendle’s book of the same name, is inspired by the real life story of Jack Parsons and explores the dramatic intersection between genius and madness, science, and science fiction.

Jack Sharkey’s serialized novella The Programmed People, which concludes in this July 1963 Amazing, describes a tight arc from mediocre to appalling and lands with a thud….

(17) BRADBURY CALLING. This is from a column by Nilanjana Roy called “When Books Are Burned” in the Financial Times (behind a paywall).

Fahrenheit 451 began in 1951 as a novella called The Fireman. Bradbury set down 25,000 words in nine days, renting a desk in the typing room in the basement of the UCLA library. He wrote to a fan in 2006, ‘How could I have written so many words so quickly? It was because of the library. All of my friends, all of my loved ones, were on the shelve above and shouted, yelled, and shrieked at me to be creative…You can imagine how exciting it was to do a book about book burning in the very presence of hundreds of my beloveds on the shelves…’

…What he (Bradbury) anticipated, even in the pre-Internet, pre-Twitter, pre-WhatsApp 1950s, was the time we’ve reached–an age of manic consumption of a constant stream of often useless information. For Bradbury, what was terrifying was not just the burning of books, it was the way in which people were prepared to turn against those who refused to sup at the same shallow pools, to persecute those who step away from the stream.

Re-reading Fahrenheit 451 decades after I’d first read it as a teenager, I heard Bradbury’s plea far more clearly. In a world gone mad from too much junk, don’t forget reading, or books, or the necessaity of slow conversations and contemplative silence in a time of howling mobs and incessant noise.

FCTRY, a product incubator, kicked off a crowd fundraiser on Tuesday to raise the money to create an action figure of the 85-year-old associate justice.

It gave itself 35 days to raise its $15,000 goal on Kickstarter. As of Tuesday evening, just hours after launch, the company had raised more than $67,000.

(19) DUMBO TRAILER. Now out – the teaser trailer for Tim Burton’s all-new live-action Dumbo, coming to theatres March 2019.

From Disney and visionary director Tim Burton, the all-new grand live-action adventure “Dumbo” expands on the beloved classic story where differences are celebrated, family is cherished and dreams take flight. Circus owner Max Medici (Danny DeVito) enlists former star Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) and his children Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins) to care for a newborn elephant whose oversized ears make him a laughingstock in an already struggling circus. But when they discover that Dumbo can fly, the circus makes an incredible comeback, attracting persuasive entrepreneur V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton), who recruits the peculiar pachyderm for his newest, larger-than-life entertainment venture, Dreamland. Dumbo soars to new heights alongside a charming and spectacular aerial artist, Colette Marchant (Eva Green), until Holt learns that beneath its shiny veneer, Dreamland is full of dark secrets.

(20) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Fish With Legs is a Screen Australia cartoon on Vimeo, directed by Dave Carter, about what happened when all the fish in Australia suddenly sprouted legs!

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chip Hitchcock, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Andrew Porter, Mike Kennedy, Martin Morse Wooster, and Carl Slaughter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jack Lint.]

85 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/13/18 But File’s Just A Pixel And Pixels Weren’t Meant To Last”

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(13) I believe the town should be “Menlo” rather than “Menio.” Found when I googled to check it out.

(19) That made me consider, what reboot could cause me to scream “you’ve destroyed my childhood!” and I came to the conclusion – Thundarr the Barbarian. A live action Thundarr with young, clean-cut actors would hit me hard right in the feelings.

Okay, did anyone else but me look at the still-shot opening of the Dumbo teaser (didn’t bother to look at the whole thing) and immediately think: “So, why is a baby elephant standing on Captain America’s shield”?

@August et al
I see a few different types of plotless stories in the SFF short fiction I review for Rocket Stack Rank. I should preface this by saying I use a very broad definition of “plot.” I consider a coming-of-age story to have a plot, even though the protagonist is never explicit that he/she wants to grow up. A travel story has a plot (get to point B). Even a story where a character simply becomes a better person has a plot in my book. By no means am I insisting on an action-adventure type of plot.

Probably the most objectionable plotless story is the “tale”. This is a story where the characters aren’t trying to accomplish any particular goal; things just happen to them, and the story seems to end when the author got tired of writing it. (I’ve been told that everything before about 1750 was a tale; that plots are a modern idea. Not sure that’s 100% true, but it’s easy to see how it might be.)

Another type is what I’ve come to think of as the “setting” story. This is one where the author has done extensive world building and really wants to show it off. The characters are disposable and forgettable. Unfortunately, the setting usually is too.

I used to give a max of 2 stars to any plotless story, but I had to stop because there are just too many of them. Today I’ll give such things 3 stars as long as they’re not unpleasant to read.

Across about 2500 stories I’ve reviewed so far, I think I have actually recommended (4 stars or more) only one plotless story, although I don’t remember which one it was. It was a really cool setting, the story seemed to really take me there, and I would have been happy to learn more about it. That’s really hard to pull off with no plot, but clearly it can be done.

Greg Hullender @ 3:18: I’ve been told that everything before about 1750 was a tale; that plots are a modern idea. Not sure that’s 100% true, but it’s easy to see how it might be.

Offhand, I’d say it isn’t true, or at least not exactly true; among other things, Aristotle listed “plot” as the most important element of tragedy, indicating that it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Of possible relevance to the discussion, I think, he also said that plot was the most important element because it wasn’t possible to have a tragedy without a plot, while it was possible for a tragedy to exist without any of the other elements . . . including character and setting, as it happens. I’ve never been quite sure what to make of that–it partly depends on the definitions of the terms, I suppose–but at least it indicates the existence of something in Aristotle’s mind that I would recognize as “plot.”

So, it’s 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I’m sitting on the living room floor reading over a contract for a German anthology reprint of “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” Ann’s in a chair with her tablet, and a FedEx truck pulls up. The driver carts a big, heavy-looking thing up the steps and leaves it at our door. Neither of us is expecting a delivery, so our first thought, really, is that it’s been left at the wrong address and we’re going to have to deal with that — the truck is gone before we get the door open.

It’s a big bag, and it is heavy. Ann reads the tag, says “It’s for you, from Belgium,” and drags it into the house. An international mailing bag. All we can think of is Tiptree books from a foreign publisher, not that they’ve ever come like this before. I cut the plastic strips holding it shut and fish out a cardboard box. Definitely books. It’s not a box, though, but cardboard wrapped around the books and taped to death. It seems to take forever to cut the plastic straps and tape securing everything, but I finally free my prize: one single, enormously heavy book. A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions by Arthur Jafa.

Me: blank look. The back cover, though, explains why it’s here. There’s a list of names which includes James Tiptree, Jr., along with other familiar ones like Paolo Bacigalupi, Samuel R. Delany and Lucius Shepard.

Onto the internet I go. It turns out, this is the museum catalog for an exhibit by Arthur Jafa at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Jafa is an African-American visual artist (he was the cinematographer for the gorgeous film about the Carolina Gullahs, Daughters of the Dust, years ago), who made quite a stir last year with a seven-minute video setting found footage to Kanye West’s song “Ultralight Beam.” Jafa’s piece is called “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death,” so he’s definitely a Tiptree fan. For the catalog, though, instead of “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death,” he reprints “The Women Men Don’t See.” He also runs the picture of little Alice Bradley standing in front of a tribe of Kikiyu, and the picture of her from the cover of Julie Phillips’ biography. (Also included is the Leo and Diane Dillon cover for Deathbird Stories.)

I don’t know what I’m going to do with this 11”x13 1/2”, 848-page artifact, but it’s pretty cool. Jafa’s goal is to find a way to achieve black visual art that is as recognizably black as black music is, and what I’ve read in here and in interviews on the web has been very interesting. I don’t imagine I’ll read the whole thing (for reasons of unwieldiness if nothing else), but the time I’ve spent with it so far has certainly been worthwhile.

@Kaboobie: “Any time I hear part of this speech from Hamlet, my brain starts playing the musical version from Gilligan’s Island.”

Yes! I’m not the only one!

@Darren Garrison: “That reminds me–Jasper Fforde needs to hurry up and write the last book in his Last Dragonslayer series. And the next Shades of Grey Not Those Shades of Grey book.”

Not to mention the next Thursday Next book – which now reminds me that I ought to get to work on Tom Holt’s The Management Style of the Supreme Beings, but I want to reread the first Kevin Christ book before I start this second one.

@Greg Hullender: echoing Mary Frances, I have an omnibus edition of three Robert Silverberg novels; in the introduction, he says “I learned much of what I know about constructing plots from a careful study of Greek tragedy.”

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
Do not forget: Stay out of debt.
Think twice, and take this good advice from me.
Guard that old solvency.
There’s just one other thing you ought to do —
To thine own self be true.

Doctor Science on June 14, 2018 at 8:25 pm said:
Just a few days ago Mr Dr & I started singing Gilligan’s Shakespeare while cleaning up after supper, and had to stop to teach it to our offspring. THE CYCLE CONTINUES!

And I remember a collection of Anne McCaffrey stories titled “Get Off the Unicorn”. It was, of course, supposed to be “of”, but was misprinted at the contract stage. McCaffrey and editor Judy-Lynn Del Rey supposedly decided to just go with it.

Never having watched Gilligan’s Island, the earworm I get is Oor Hamlet. (This is the Martin Carthy version; the Adam McNaughton original is in such brrrraid Scots as to be nearly unintelligible to a non-native audience.)